topic Re: NIC Driver Install in Operating System - Linux

NIC Driver Install

Duffster — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:10:08 GMT

I have recently installed RHEL 5.4 but need to install the correct NIC drivers in order to gain network connectivity. Eth0 is currently using driver bnx2x but I am using a "HP Ethernet Pass Thru Module" and so I am trying to install driver e1000 .

So I have run a "make install" on the e1000 src dir and all seem good until I try and include/add the module I get the following error:

insmod: error inserting <path_to_e1000.ko>: -1 Invalid module format

Has anybody seen this before or know what the problem might be??

Re: NIC Driver Install

Matti_Kurkela — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:25:42 GMT

This seems strange: e1000 is the driver for certain Intel gigabit NICs (mainly PCI/PCI-X I think), and bnx2x is for Broadcom NICs. As the bnx2x apparently is auto-detected for your eth0 (by PCI device manufacturer ID and device ID wildcard), your NIC chips are probably manufactured by Broadcom, not by Intel. You'll probably need a newer version of the appropriate Broadcom NIC driver.

Since you talk about "Pass Thru Module", you probably have some sort of blade hardware, probably c-class blades. What's the exact blade model you have? A typical model number could be BL460c G5, for example.

In HP blade hardware, the type of I/O module does not change the type of the required driver (although some advanced I/O modules may require a higher version of the driver), since the actual NIC chip is in the blade, either integrated in the system board of the blade, or on a mezzanine card. The blade NIC uses a common wiring in the chassis backplane to communicate with the I/O module. The Pass Thru module is the simplest possible I/O module type: essentially it's little more than a signal converter for changing the signals coming from the blade NIC to a format suitable for the network cables, and vice versa.

I don't recall Intel NICs being used in c-class Proliant blades at all (but I might be wrong).

Re: NIC Driver Install

Duffster — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:05:11 GMT

Issue now resolved. Incidently nothing to do with the drivers as the bnx2x driver is the correct driver for the NIC (HP Pass-Thru Module). The switch that the Pass-Thru module was talking to was a 3COM 100MB and does not have 1G capability. The 3COM Switch is not compatible as the HP Ethernet Pass-Thru module does not auto negotiate and will not accept commands to operate at any uplink speed other than 1Gb. Solution was to upgrade/change the switch to which my NIC was talking.